Thursday, February 03, 2005

What is EDI anyway?

EDI enables the computers of one company to “talk” to the computers at another company. Faxing and mailing of paper documents are replaced with fast and efficient electronic documents.

EDI uses standards to define how EDI records will be formatted. However, companies can use the flexibility that is included in the standards to fit their particular business needs.

The variation of EDI transaction formats from one company to another makes EDI more of a challenge for small and mid-sized businesses that do not have information technology departments with dedicated staff resources.

EDI is used by a large number of companies and in a wide variety of industries. In 2005, over 80,000 companies use EDI to improve their efficiency and to help their business partners. It is very typical for many of these companies to insist that their partners also use EDI.

Other common EDI documents include production planning releases, payment remittance advices, requests for quote, responses to requests for quote, organization changes for shipping addresses and product activity data reports.

Companies that require their partners to use EDI will provide an EDI guide. The EDI guide will describe exactly how the EDI transactions should be formatted.

EDI records must be perfectly formatted in order to pass the company’s validation requirements for input into their EDI system. But once EDI transactions have been thoroughly tested, they flow between business partners automatically, without human intervention and far quicker than faxes or mailed documents.

Welcome to the EDI Blog.
The purpose of this blog is provide information about EDI that is of interest to small and mid-size businesses. Topics discussed include EDI capability that is needed in order to sell to large customers, web based EDI, EDI systems, EDI integration, EDI solutions and EDI VANs.
Questions and comments are welcome.

About Me

Steve is the president of CovalentWorks, a position he assumed in December of 2000. CovalentWorks provides web based EDI services to small and mid-size businesses. He has held a variety of technology leadership positions including VP of business development for BSI Consulting, Director at BSG, and management positions with EDS and Accenture.